Eris and the Quote of Licci Vade
by on-campaign
Summary: Colonists from Mars escape bombardment by Grineer and seek refuge in Corpus territory. They quickly find that there is no home left. For them, its either indenture or death.
1. Chapter 1

**Eris and the Quote of Licci Vade - Part 1**

In all the system, it was a difficult thing to say we had a colony on Mars, all to ourselves. There wasn't any such concept, to own something so large without someone bigger owning you as well. And yeah, that's how it went with us, under the Corpus' thumbs for so long. The thing of it, though, this one Mars colony, was that the Corpus didn't want to bother so much with it. Just wanted it to work and for us to send them their dues, and we'd keep on keeping on. In the fifteen days of flight after our escape from the bombardment, I had this one really slow day. Clara had the freighter piloting down by then. The last families were all accounted for (it was easy to lose a kid even on a smaller freighter like we had), twenty-six people in total, everyone in decent shape, food from the larders all rationed out. I sat down with Ms. Quinn, the old administrator and asked if we could do the math. What's the number, the big number, the money. How much was lost? Just how impossible would it be to see something like our colony again? She never gave me a number, or really spoke at all that day.

Now, we were shooting for Neptune, a rifle at my side and Clara in the seat next to me. She was wearing the same brown tank-top and coveralls, tied tightly around her waist. They used to be a stoney grey, but the oily, grime-ridden holes she climbed into to keep the freighter running painted them muddy. She was reading some operations manual she dug up out of a late engineer's desk. Many of these days, we sat in quiet, still reeling from the attack. Still felt like it was only hours ago. She asked me once, where do we go. I don't know, I could've said. Everything any of us knew just evaporated like it never happened. How the hell could someone know? Maybe there was no where to go, or maybe there was everywhere. I could have said a lot of things, but the fact was there was nothing left. Only one direction to go in. I couldn't even say that.

And there was Neptune now, the crown jewel of my bad ideas when she asked again, where do we go.

"But what if they don't take us in?" Clara asked.

We pressed into orbit, the planet shining like a blue marble, like encapsulated sky. "We have a Corpus ship," I said. There was quiet. The ship hummed and rattled. I couldn't help but think we were piloting an old refrigerator. I looked from the viewer to her. The big round blue of Neptune's surface gleamed off the teary sheen of her eyes. Slack jawed, still scared, not yet numb to it all.

"It's _their_ ship."

"The Grineer don't know how to track this stuff, Clara, it was hijacked tech. They probably think they blew it all up, anyway."

Her eyes set on me, expelling Neptune's image from them. They were a hard, darkly brown. Any other day, I'd have admired that sharp a gaze. "That's not what I mean," she said. "You know that's not what I mean."

The ship groaned as we entered gravity. It was already battered. In disarray. The Grineer never knew how to take care of much. Those few weeks ago, I watched two of them gargle commands at the Messers' kid to fix the shoddy cargo bay door, their logic relying solely on the fact that they saw him scrubbing the floor of machining grease that day. They were big guys, especially in their lumpy, bulbous armor. Each one had a wrinkled, cut up face that was essentially a scowl stretched over two bright coals for eyes. The kid was right to do what they wanted, even if they themselves didn't know how the work could be done. They used their guns like clubs on that skinny Messers' kid when he didn't know how, either. I hoped the kid made it out of the blastwave, but I'd never know for sure if he did or not.

The viewer lit up with protocols, logistics. Technobabble I could make little sense of. I assumed it was some sort of docking procedure that fires up when you get close enough to a waystation.

"They're calling it in, I think," I said. We lurched as the ship tugged away at a different angle, aligning itself to wherever it was being told to go.

"Do we just let them take it in?" Clara asked. "Won't they be surprised when none of their techs are on board, just a bunch of stowaways?" She hadn't noticed the notification icon in the viewer. She wouldn't have. Never spent much time on the ships with them to recognize the symbols. It was a small, almost innocuous red pip, like an alarm or alert, at the bottom right of the protocol windows that trilled and blipped and filled with litanies of Corpus text. It was blinking there, like an eye. The Corpus already knew.

Whatever plan I had washed away in that moment. Something felt wrong. Show up on Neptune, I had thought. Give 'em back their gear, get a pat on the back, and re-assimilate, but it hit me just then that it had been a year since the colony was taken by the Grineer. A full year since the occupation. Fifteen days since the bombardment. Would they even register us as their own, anymore? Were we strangers? Maybe part of me would have liked it better that way.

Was there anything I could do about it, now? I never asked. _Just keep going_.

My fingers were cold. Bone cold, like Neptune's terrible chill was already sucking the life from me. I tried my best to chip away at the controls; overrides, hailing commands, anything. I didn't know how to do any of it. We plummeted closer.

"You're breathing too hard," Clara said. "The oxygen budget."

The protocols stopped. I stopped. Bold Corpus text dominated the viewer, like a banner. It read _Welcome back to Corpus Space!_ A rough voice played over comms, more like barking than language. "Who is piloting vessel, designation S113-C?"

Clara hunched forward in her seat. She looked small. Her tank-top had blackened with sweat around the collar. The question repeated, with an addition. "Silence will indicate non-compliance. The use of force may be deemed applicable."

Clara gave me one vacant look. I stated my name.

Silence.

"This vessel, designation S113-C, is marked as written off. You will be redirected."

"What does that mean?" she asked. I couldn't bring myself to say anything. I had no idea.

A face appeared on screen, translucent, giving the impression that it was imprinted on the surface of Neptune itself. He seemed jovial, but poised. Makeup dominated his features, playing up his cheekbones like gaunt, alabaster cliff edges. Markings hung under his entirely silver eyes like black cradles. "You speak with Licci Vade, today. With whom do I converse?"

I stated my name.

"Allow me to access your accounts," Licci Vade said. His gaze never shifted, just staring right through us, and the way he spoke verged on song. Gratified, even. No doubt he already knew everything about me that any of their logs would betray. "Oh this is unfortunate. What was your business on Neptune?"

"We were returning a Corpus ship, wanted to return under Corpus citizenship," I said. "What's unfortunate?"

Licci Vade smiled. His perfectly unmoving head lent the smile an unnatural elasticity, as though strings had pulled at the corners of his lips. "To begin, this ship has been marked as written off, were you aware? The reason is listed as theft."

Clara straightened in her seat with a jolt. "We pulled it from the Grineer. They kept it when they took the colony," she said. "It would have been garbage two weeks ago."

"Your name?" asked Licci Vade. His wry smile persisted, his eyes still dead, still full of metal.

Clara winced, like she had been spotted hiding on the other side of a wall. "Clara," she said.

"Full names are acceptable." Licci Vade's tone flattened, empty of all humor. He seemed like a man who cared about pleasantries, manners, social protocol, but I knew full well he had a system of inquiries in front of him that could only accept a full name. Before I could shake my head to protest, she knew what I was thinking.

"Clara is all you'll get," she said. She was sitting upright, angry, coiled.

Systems trilled somewhere on Neptune, the tune to Licci Vade's ceaseless, spectral gaze from beyond the viewer. In this brief moment I realized he had yet to blink. His smile would not relent. "Records indicate one Clara Dirsk as the designated inclusionary shipping & handling specialist for cargo vessel S113-C, as per the "We Profit Together" program for closed Corpus colony #1246, of Mars."

Clara crossed her arms, looked away. A week ago, she'd have been invincible, probably would have given her full name and her mother's too just to seem that way. Untouchable. Even when it was Grineer knocking in our doors, Grineer pumping oil through the crops to fuel the lighted catwalks on their gun emplacements. She worked her shifts, toiled. Somehow Licci Vade corroded whatever armor she had left.

"Licci Vade," I said. "They destroyed it, tore it down from orbit. We just want to get back to our lives and 'profit together' or whatever it is you need to hear."

He didn't spare a second. "One-point-two-seven-five million credits."

I don't know for how long I stared blankly at the viewer before finally uttering, "What?"

"You see, as the designated inclusionary shipping & handling specialist, Clara Dirsk is responsible for returning Corpus equipment limited to within and including cargo vessel S113-C, punctually, or incur late fees per hour of her failure to return it. In addition, the written-off status of the vessel due to theft ended her "We Profit Together" ship insurance. S113-C is to be refurbished upon collection and retrofitted to remain current with Corpus technology, due to its markedly damaged condition."

I should have realized that being alive and willing was never enough for the Corpus. You had to pay for that, too, just for admitting it. "What about my services in the militia," I said. "I have to be entitled to some kind of credit, or military discount."

Clara shot me a look, as if to say _are you serious._

Licci Vade's image froze for a few moments, _or was he thinking_. "Mr. Dirsk, your services in the 'We Profit Together' program were exemplary," he said. "According to records."

I smirked at Clara, or at least attempted a smirk. Instead, more of a half-satisfied grunt escaped me. But Licci Vade continued.

"Unfortunately," he said. "As per the closing of colony #1246, nearly all accounts have been terminated. Reactivation fees are reflected in my, Licci Vade's, estimate."

There was no oxygen, my lungs pulled emptiness. _Should I have been surprised?_ All that time hanging in space on the question of a tether to home. The boarding parties. The Grineer. For nothing.

"We won't comply, Vade," Clara said. She was bent under the controls now, fiddling. Tinkering.

"Full names are acceptable," he said. "And as you are doubtlessly aware, vessel S113-C has been called to a secure docking station, where we will discuss your several financing options on high-risk colonies." At this, Licci Vade bore his teeth in a glinting, leprous grin.

The rifle next to my seat hummed, called to me. If anything, if it all went to hell, at least I could look threatening before they gunned us down. The high-risk colonies were the incinerators of the Corpus empire, where all of the write offs are sent. The gun was a Lanka, a long sleek thing that was all metal and corners. It had belonged to one of the technicians we boarded the freighter with, before the attack. It could hold a charge if you kept on squeezing the trigger, ready to rip a hole in whatever it was pointed at. That's exactly what the technician did to the Grineer navigations-man who tried to make off with the ship when he realized he'd be going down with the colony. Who knows. Maybe I could carve out a hole in the greeting party large enough for everyone else to run through. That's how it worked on the seventh Profit Sortie aboard the Cast-in-Gold. I could do it again.

Sparks shot down over Clara in a shining cascade. She was on her back now, half vanished beneath the console. The ship trembled and the rifle rattled away onto the faded brown stain where the Grineer navigations-man fell a few days prior. Clara grunted as she yanked a bundle of cables that didn't want to tear.

"How did he do it?" she asked, absently. How do who do what, I thought? _What the hell was she doing?_ She pushed herself out from under the console and sat up. Her face was ashed by cinder, the frayed edges of her hair singed. That look in her eyes. Resolute.

"Pull these," she said, pointing over her shoulder to the tenacious bundle of cables.

I looked out at the image of Licci Vade. Still smiling. He was enjoying these last moments of our hopeless, defiant panic. All of my muscles pulled, went hot. Whatever plan Clara had, we needed it to work. "Take a seat," I said. "And keep your eyes on him for me."

She reached up and I pulled her to her feet before wedging myself under the console. It was hot, the air almost rubbery with the smell of melted cable casing. Above me was a morass of multi-colored wires twisting into each other, some cut, some fused together. A few were almost entirely exposed, the red cables coiling into greens. Someone was in this before. A fat arm of bundled cables hung close to my face, spiraling into some kind of black box. I curled my arm around it and braced it against my chest, turned so that my back was to the seats. I pressed my boots against the back of the console and heaved. For a moment the room spun as the cables let go. The last thing I saw before my head clapped against the floor were Licci Vade's mercury eyes, panoptic, seeing all. The ship stalled.

"You okay?" Clara asked. "I think it worked."

I stayed flat on my back for a few moments, coughing as the room pieced itself back together into focus. I had only one question.

"Did he blink?"

"He blinked," Clara said.

"I did not," Vade barked.

I clambered back to my feet and looked at the viewer. No more smile.

"What did you do?" Licci Vade asked, his voice verging on demand.

"Got you to change the look on your weird mug, for one," I said. The scowl it inspired on Licci Vade's face could be heard from orbit. I glanced at Clara and smiled, and she rolled her eyes. I kept on smiling. She smiled, too.

"We didn't do much, Vade," Clara said. "Just before the colony came under fire, we followed a few of the technicians that the Grineer kept alive on-board. The auto-pilot had already engaged when they prepped it for take-off. There's some return-to-sender hardware somewhere in there that started piloting the ship back to some way off repair station as part of the colony's SOS signal. Real sneaky bit of hardware. I don't know much about it, but your techs did.

"The problem, Vade, was that the auto-pilot was taking us right into the firepath. It was like flying into the Sun. So the techs went to work right here in this console. They were too panicked to care that I was watching. Once they freed us from the auto-pilot and got us out, they patched it back together. Whatever damage they repaired, I guess it was easy enough to undo. I never understood why you guys put me in charge of shipping & handling."

I sat at the controls and fiddled around, washed over by relief coming down in buckets. Clara did exactly what I had hoped. I think I heard myself laughing as Neptune spun out of view and stars streaked across the viewer. Licci Vade's face remained etched into the screen, ethereal, darkened by the blackness of space. His silver eyes glittered with hatred.

"We're not bringing the ship back, Vade," Clara said. "Just forget we came at all, why not?"

That trilling played again from behind Licci Vade's unwavering image. _What was he doing, now?_ I swear he spent these moments simply looking at us, appraising us with those eery, ball bearing eyes. In the wait for him to speak I had realized how badly my shoulders ached, like two steel rods were shot between my arms and neck. Finally, he spoke.

"An asset protection team has been dispatched. A receipt for this transaction has been sent to your net-comms address as provided by your accounts," he said. "Have a splendid day."

With that, the image of Licci Vade tore away in a flash of static, leaving only a silent, vast distance we could hide in. He could chase us all he wanted. I stared at the launch button that would boost the ship into Punch. It wouldn't solve our problems, but it would get us away from at least one of them, and for that it looked golden. I pushed the button.

"Admit it," Clara said. I could hear her smile. Knowing that almost helped. I didn't look to see. I pushed the button. "Come on, admit it," she said again.

I slammed my fist on the button. "Yeah, this was a bad idea," I said.

"I was just trying to be funny."

I looked at her. She looked hurt, confused maybe, angry in the way she used to be when I said something stupid. Like a little glimmer of her had come back, in the corner of her lips where they curled up slightly, sarcastically, as if to say damn right you owe me an apology. Something must've happened when I ripped those cables out. I was so sorry I had to say it.

"We're not accelerating."

That numbness washed over her face like her mind shrank away to some far place. Her eyes lost their shimmer under heavy lids, and my heart squeezed.

"Oh."


	2. Chapter 2

**Eris and the Quote of Licci Vade - Part 2**

There's one long hallway on the ship that branches into small, reasonably accommodated living spaces. Not enough for an entire crew of Corpus, however. No, they were expected to work in shifts, and so they were expected to sleep in shifts. This way, costs on design could be kept down with only a fraction of the crew resting at any given time. Like a machine. It was enough for the rest of us. Now, it was time to tell everyone what was chasing us, and hope they wouldn't ask about the plan.

Me and Clara could hear them whispering in panic-filled hisses behind the gate to bunk 4. We used this one as sort of a common room. A small square frame beside the door spewed shredded wires that sparked past what remained of the glass screen. We only got through some of the clock-in/clock-out door locks.

I handed the rifle off to Clara, wedged my fingers into the seams of the gate. Only way to get them open now.

The gate whined apart, revealing only Quinn sat on the floor on a ramshackle throne of crumpled sheets and pillows. Quinn used to be the administrator for the old colony, not that the title meant much. I always saw her as middle-management, someone who could never have the courage to say no to her Corpus overlords. She may as well have been public relations, a proxy hidden away in those distant offices on a tall, red hill outside the commerce center. The Corpus talked through her to the workers, the regulars. The idea was that when jobs were cut and colonists shipped off to who knows where, or taxes hiked, or medicine and rations shipments waylaid due to budgeting, it was supposed to be easier to hear from someone who wasn't one of them. I always wondered if some of those decisions were actually hers, to impress the brass. She saw us and frantically wiped at her wet cheeks, now decorated with makeup in the style of Corpus markings. Those were new.

"Where's everyone else?" I asked. "Thought you were talking to someone."

She straightened and clambered to her feet, shaky, hands buzzing around and finicky like when you don't know where to put them. She cast one concerned glance at a comms tablet on the desk/ It displayed a countdown ticking down from a five-hour mark. We saw it on the viewer in the navigations bay after we dropped comms with Vade.

"They're hiding, I think," Quinn said. "Maybe just in their rooms. I was praying."

"To what?" I asked. I couldn't look away from that countdown. Fat, blue numbers flipping away in silence.

"It's the time until intercept," Clara said. "Bastard must've broadcast it to every screen he could tie into."

Licci Vade, even a full hour after seeing his image blip into nothing on the viewer, was like a ghost haunting every unlit corner.

"A man's face popped on the screens and he said something about a time until arrival," Quinn said. She turned and began neatening up the bottom bunks, as though the state of a bed on a stolen ship could possibly be a pressing issue. One of her nervous ticks, I thought. "But we're not going to Neptune, are we?"

"No," I said. "Wanted to talk to everyone about that."

"Then where?" She tossed a pillow to the ground to get it out of the way and flattened the sheets against the mattress. The sheets went taut with a hiss as the bed's suction devices sealed itself like the skin over a drum.

"Away from Neptune," I said. Didn't have anything better for her. How unfortunate, as Vade put it. I had to end up the idea man.

Quinn abandoned her little cleaning ritual and shot this glare my way. A down-the-nose kind of look, like some disappointed parent staring down her kid who messed up big.

"So, what?" she said. "You want me to tell the rest that you ran out of ideas? That you ran out your plan for nothing and we're just done? We just wait for these thugs to dump all of us out of an airlock?"

Part of me wanted to relent, say yeah would you, because I don't want to see the looks on their faces. Instead, I looked at Clara. She looked at me. What the hell.

I always knew Quinn as unsteady, despite what people said. I made it a kind of unspoken game of finding her ticks. The day Quinn announced under armed guard that the Corpus wouldn't be reinforcing the colony against the Grineer fleet I remember Clara crushing my hand in hers (or was it the other way?). Quinn stuttered and flinched with every gasp or outburst from the crowd, like an electric current was racing through her feet. She had nerves in her bones that could feel the wind pick up a mile out, but this outburst of hers wasn't nerves.

I think I almost mouthed a reply, but I had nothing. Clearly my mouth was more hopeful than my brain. My hands moved almost on their own to feel the weight of the rifle and grasped nothing. I remembered Clara had been holding it.

Maybe I could have told her we'd fly as far as the ship could take us before the engines fell apart or the fuel went cold or until the food ran out. In our last moments, we could mark our coordinates in the system and write them down on a notepad. Figure the distance between there and the old colony and write "we made it this much further than the others" on our legal-pad grave marker. There was no place left in the system that wasn't owned, so specifically not ours. The Corpus would work us to death if they found it worthwhile not to kill us. The Grineer would simply kill us.

"Quinn," I said, finally. "Look, right now the plan is to stay quiet, run the ship on as low power as we can manage, and hide." Clara wandered over to the desk and looked over the comms tablet, poking around. "We can't speed up enough to Punch out of here but they're gonna have trouble finding us. Between the Grineer and Clara, this ship is so shredded, their trackers won't know what this junker is."

"You can't know that," Quinn said."They would have found us anyway!" _Found us anyway?_ "How could you know-"

"What's with the makeup, Quinn?" Clara asked.

That hawkish look on Quinn's face broke, melted away. Her eyes went glassy. I remember that, her eyes going glassy. I just can't remember if it was in that moment, or if they had always been shrink-wrapped in that penitent sheen. I should have guessed.

Quinn sat down on the bunk, her head low, and the ship lurched under my feet.

Everything around us quaked, rumbling like the walls would shake apart and drop us into the vacuum's icy nothingness. I felt a shot through my shoulder as I clapped against the doorframe.

A low hum wallowed in the air. The room was a wreck. Some lights guttered, while others squeezed out an unpleasant, hard red. The desk where Clara had braced herself, gripping the rifle to her chest, had vomited a torrent of paperwork and stationary. Quinn pulled herself from the ruin of the bunk as I got my footing. Clara remained, pressing her back to the wall, clutching the rifle, every feature on her face taut with alert.

The comms tablet trilled, the words "Time until cleanup" displayed beneath the countdown.

Clara had that stone-eyed look again. Full-on emotional dead-stop. I motioned to her for the gun. She gave it up.

Quinn coughed as she fell from the bunk. The kind of cough when someone thinks they ought to be coughing, and then can't stop once they get that first one out. That's the kind of person she was, doing what she ought to be doing, what she expected she was expected to do. I helped her up.

"Don't - _cough-_ yank me by the collar like that," Quinn coughed.

"Tell me what's happened, Quinn," I said. "Tell me right now so we can get ready."

"Don't point that at me," she said. I hadn't noticed. I lowered the rifle with a guilty pang. I craned my head to see Clara in her corner, to see if she was watching, but she was dusting herself off.

Quinn's eyes shined with tears. She shook her head. "He talked to me, that man Vade. That's what you heard before you came in the room."

The world sank. Felt like I was underwater.

"He told me," she said. "He told me that if I gave him the coordinates now, instead of waiting for us to be found-and that's what he said, he said he _would_ find us- a discount would be applied to the rest of our account reactivations. The Corpus don't make deals like that!"

"No," I said. "They don't."

Quinn coughed again. "Look, that was the best I could do, that's what I always tried to do. The deals I had to make, the people I had to give up, to keep the colony profitable…" She coughed, spastic now. I could never get it through my head how she didn't get it. Was she too afraid? Did it all happen too fast? We were all that was left. There was no colony anymore, just the change you get when you break a credit, and we added up to almost nothing. Even still, that's all Vade and his money-grubbing clean-up crew would want; anything that adds up. And she sold us out. She wheezed. In that moment, I hated her.

A fist jabbed my shoulder. "You're choking her," Clara said.

She was right. I had one hand around her neck. Quinn's face was red, sweat filming over the veins that throbbed in her temples, her eyes going pink, pupils dilated, filled to the brim with fury and terror, and for a brief moment, I didn't mind.

I relented and Quinn gasped curses and coughed and spit, and I backed away. I dropped the rifle to the ground and slumped against the wall beside the door and held my head in my hands. I could feel Clara watching me, unsure, maybe afraid. I always tried to be the one who could never come unhinged. But there wasn't a moment to hide in.

I heard footsteps approach me, delicate, slow. The scraping sound of the rifle being dragged off the floor. I was surprised Clara would be so eager to pull me up to my feet after all that.

"Hey. Quinn," Clara said. Her voice was stern. Concerned. "Quinn, hey, Quinn what are you doing?"

"Shut up!" Quinn barked.

I lifted my head to see what was happening. It wasn't Clara's soft approach, like I thought. Really, how could it have been. It was Quinn, rifle in hand, the red brand my fingers left behind glowing hot on her throat.

"Quinn," I said, almost automatically. "Come on, stop. Don't do this, too." Clara leered daggers from behind Quinn, her hands floating helplessly in front of her.

"No, you don't get it." She was crying. "At the start of all this, my job was to manage you idiots, just to make sure you did your jobs. That's it. And-and then when the Corpus came to check up, they showed me all these numbers. Crop yields, mining hauls, operations costs, revenue from exports. And they said 'not enough.' When I worked the colony harder, when I rationed food and medicine, when I extended hours, they came back with their numbers and said 'halve the cost.' I asked how, I asked why, and they told me it was my job to know, and if I didn't get it all done, they would replace me. Or you, or her, or anyone. Or they wouldn't. We would just be gone.

"And so my job changed from running the colony to running it tightly, make it so we kept more and they took less, and now there's, what, twenty of us left? It's some of us or none of us, damn it, and you'd just gamble us all away." I opened my mouth to speak and she leveled the sights under her right eye. I shrank. "I don't even know your names and you expect me to die with you?"

"What are you gonna do here, Quinn?" Clara asked.

Quinn's finger coiled around the trigger. "I'm going to do my job, like always. Cut losses, preserve what's left. We start over, move on, tighten our belts, and work. We keep going."

"But why?" I asked. "Why sell us out for that?"

She was silent for an eternity. "It's all I know. All I ever knew."

For the next few moments before she pulled the trigger, I felt foolish. I always pegged Quinn as some crony that had her own chair in her own office, and all she did was make life harder, but here's the thing of it. Life's just hard. Quinn must've been trying to take a punch as best she could, just to keep enduring her next blinkered days.

Is that what we were doing, or just running away? I guess, for Quinn, it's hard giving up on what you know.

"Maybe I had you wrong," I said. Quinn was unmoved. I looked to Clara and spoke her name, knowing in my gut it may as well be my last word.

Quinn's shoulders tensed and Clara burst forward to tackle her. Then I heard it, the snap of the trigger.

And nothing.


End file.
